by Mel Bradshaw
Once the ambulances had come and gone, I got Ned and Rudy to search Oscar’s apartment.
Ruth was on her feet at the window when I entered the Night Owl coffee shop. A half-eaten piece of pineapple upside-down cake and a pot of tea stood on the table behind her.
“You going to spill the beans, Paul?” she asked.
“As soon as I’ve made one phone call.”
The call was to Inspector Sanderson. I didn’t want him reading in the press anything about his department that he hadn’t been told first. He didn’t resent my calling him at home and dragging him away from a “thrilling” game of contract bridge. I could hear the smile in his voice. And the frost that followed when I had to break it to him that one of his men had been shot. I didn’t blame him. I was pretty unhappy about that myself. All the same, I gamely pointed out that in a day or so Harry would be back at City Hall and quite up to desk work, which was all the inspector had had him doing anyway. Once the Chief Constable’s Annual Report was off to the printers, I expected Detective Sergeant O’Brian to be well along the road to health. In France, a corporal in my platoon had recovered from a leg wound as grave as Harry’s and gone on in time to lead trench raids. And other men, Sanderson retorted, men with apparently trivial injuries, limped around with a cane the rest of their lives. I couldn’t argue. It might easily have been me Oscar shot at. There would have been more justice in that: the plan for this interview had been mine, and my plan had put my partner in harm’s way.
I found Ruth Stone back at her table, scribbling on a large notepad, the sleeves of her navy cardigan pushed back from her wrists and her hair pinned back from her face. I called to the counterman for coffee as I dropped into the chair across from her. She studied my face a moment before speaking.
“You’ve had a rough evening.”
“Not as rough as the two other fellas,” I replied. “Harry wounded, Oscar dead.”
“Dead — really? I guess there’s no question.”
“None at all.”
“So what happened, Paul? Give me some sort of statement.”
“Okay, but not for attribution. And you’d better not mention Oscar’s name till we notify any kin he may have had.”
“Like in the war.” Ruth flipped to a clean page in her pad and hovered her pencil above it. “Fast as you like,” she said. “I’m a whizz at Pitman.”
“It has been determined that the painter Nora Britton, originally thought to have died from an accidental fall, was murdered. She was given poisoned cookies to eat while working on a mural in the sanctuary of Christ Church Grange Park. As part of their investigation, police detectives interviewed a suspect in his apartment on Queen Street West on the evening of Tuesday, October 18. During that interview, the man picked up a revolver and shot Detective Sergeant Harry O’Brian — B-R-I-A-N — in the leg. Mr. O’Brian and Detective Sergeant Paul Shenstone returned fire. The suspect died of his injuries at the scene.”
“‘… at the scene.’” Ruth looked up from her squiggles. “How do you like that? Nora Britton murdered! Did Oscar do it?”
“Further inquiries need to be made. You can draw your own conclusions from his aggressive behaviour.”
“Nora and Oscar — both artists in a not very artistic city of five hundred thousand. So I guess he knew her. How well?”
“They were seen exchanging endearments in an ice cream parlour.”
“Sounds like a lover’s quarrel. What was the poison?”
“Scientists are still working on that. I can maybe give you more in a day or so — but do you have enough for your scoop?”
“Sure, Paul — a swell scoop. Say, did Oscar admit to having bust Wellington up?”
“Not in so many words, but I’m in no doubt. What made you think he did it?”
“Kicking with boots on,” said Ruth. “When I read in this morning’s paper Oscar had served in the Foreign Legion, I figured he’d been trained in savate. That’s a style of unarmed combat they favour. Besides, I could only make a good story of it if Wellington’s punisher were you or Oscar. You were the two men I saw outraged by the rigged fight last Thursday. Now, thanks to you, I don’t just have a good story, but a great one.”
I wondered if I’d let the idea that Oscar was a kicker distract me. Had I been too busy up in that apartment watching his feet to look for the gun?
“Gee, Paul, I’m sorry to sound so happy when your friend’s just been shot.” Ruth took my hand across the table, holding it quietly and tight.
Five minutes later she went back to her office to write up her story. I stood watching the cab I’d hailed for her pull away and get smaller and smaller until it disappeared behind other eastbound traffic on Queen Street. Then I went back up to Oscar’s apartment to find Rudy and Ned.
One look at the pile of treasures my teammates had assembled in the middle of the living room floor was enough to tell me we’d need a squad car to get them back to headquarters. The glass fish tank alone had practically the dimensions of a coffin, that of a large child at least, and I counted more than a dozen rungs in the rolled up rope ladder. The other items were smaller — Craig’s 8 millimetre Lebel revolver, an artist’s portfolio, a manila envelope, and a circular tin with a picture of the King and Queen Mary on the lid. Ned told me the latter contained four chocolate cookies, which he had without too much difficulty restrained himself from eating. He thought if they were from the batch Nora had sampled eight nights ago they might be somewhat hard and dry.
“Why would he keep such incriminating evidence?” Ned asked me. “You knew the man, Paul. Do you think he wanted to get caught?”
“Doubt it,” I said. “In my experience he thought pretty well of himself. Perhaps he was confident he could avoid suspicion, so there was no need to sacrifice the trophies of his crime.”
I picked up Oscar’s portfolio and found inside a number of pencil sketches of a fish with a white stomach, a spotty back, and a disconcertingly unfishlike little oval mouth. In some poses the creature was puffed up into a sphere with spines projecting all over. Its uninflated proportions, still portly, were shown in other drawings. The manila envelope contained a receipted invoice for the paint job Mr. Panzer had done on Craig’s Model T and Craig’s bank book. The most recent balance would cover the cost of a funeral with several thousands to spare.
“Any sign of a will?” I asked.
“I didn’t see one,” said Rudy, now seated and resting after his labours.
“I’ve been over the whole apartment,” said Ned. “Not that it’s very big — but I’ve looked in every corner where papers might be kept. I didn’t find a will, or any letters that would indicate whether he had living family.”
“I have his address book,” Rudy put in. “There may be relatives in there, but none with the name Craig.”
“Look for a Gussie or Gus with a New York City address,” I said. “She’s a friend at least.”
Rudy turned up an Augusta Buchanan on West 10th Street, which he told me would be in Greenwich Village. I don’t know how he knew; he said he’d never been to New York.
That night I sent Miss Buchanan a telegram asking if she knew who might be Oscar Craig’s next of kin. Next morning, Wednesday, Rudy and Ned started contacting other people Oscar had entered in his book. By noon it was looking as if half of them were art collectors or people who’d commissioned Oscar to paint their portraits and half were women he’d paid attention to and then dumped.
I thought it must have been an ugly break in the pattern to have Nora reject him before he rejected her. But perhaps her offence in his eyes had been worse than that. Myrtle Hutchinson had reported seeing Nora Britton kiss the man in the green car passionately on October 5, days after she had decided to return to Herman. What looked passionate to the rector’s wife might have been a good deal less. All the same, a Judas kiss in Oscar’s eyes perhaps when — later the same day? — she told him of her decision. I wondered what Nora had meant by that kiss. I couldn’t believe it had been intende
d to deceive or torment Oscar. That would have been clean out of character with the Nora Britton I had fashioned in my head over the days — not yet a week — I’d been obsessed by the mystery of her death. I preferred to think she had meant to convey that she still found Oscar attractive, was not angry with him, and didn’t want to show any coolness towards him until she had a chance to sit him down and explain that the reason for leaving him was only a rediscovery of her love for her husband, a love based on the grace of Herman’s character in adversity as well as on the soul expressed in his art. In short, she had kissed Oscar in a spirit of consideration rather than betrayal.
It wasn’t until I went for a sandwich from Uneeda Lunch that I remembered to pick up Ruth’s paper. Her story was there all right, with her name on it, plump on the front page under the headline, “Muralist Murdered: Gunplay on Queen West.” Ruth promised to bring her readers more details as they became available.
I hadn’t got to any other parts of the Dispatch when Gussie phoned from the Stuyvesant Theatre on Broadway before a Wednesday matinee. She wanted to know how Oscar had died; she hung up when I told her. I called the theatre back, even at the risk of having to pay for the call myself, and someone persuaded her to return to the phone. I got it through her head that whether or not she believed my partner and I had shot in self-defence, we needed to find an heir. She calmed down and told me Oscar had a brother, Peter, an architect in Montreal. They hadn’t been on speaking terms for years, Oscar had told her. And unless Peter could be convinced of their cash value, he was likely to throw out any artworks of Oscar’s that came his way.
Gussie’s tone was hard and bitter, the voice of a girl that knew the score. I wondered how much she did know, having just spent a weekend with Oscar.
“It must come as a shock,” I said, “hearing Oscar’s suspected of murder.”
There followed a long moment when static was the only thing coming into my ear over the five-hundred mile line from New York. I waited it out. At last Gussie’s need to talk got the better of her.
“I knew he’d killed a lot of men,” she said. “And slept with a lot of women, but to kill a woman … Oscar got dealt manly good looks, irresistible to fans of the strongman. That was me at one time.”
“Was there a kind of woman he might have resented?” I asked.
“He ever tell you the story of the deserter and the nurse?”
“It was in a newspaper interview I read.”
“This kid was only lightly wounded, but terrified of being sent back to the trenches. He tried to injure himself further, which might have got him in trouble. But a nurse’s pity made things a lot worse. Oscar despised compassionate women. He mentioned that more than once last weekend. Was Nora one of those?”
“Possibly,” I said. “Sounds like a cockeyed reason to kill someone. Anything else seem to be on Oscar’s mind?”
“He talked about wanting to do something original before he died, to contribute something new to the world. It bothered him that George Bellows had painted boxing matches before he did. He didn’t care if what he did were never recognized. Knowing what he’d done would be enough for him.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“Say, Paul, I really liked it when you and Oscar stood up to those baboons that wanted to throw me out of the speakeasy last Friday. Do you think there’ll be a funeral in Toronto?”
“That’ll be up to Peter Craig,” I said.
“If there is, I might … Oh-oh, five minutes to curtain. Gotta go.”
Later that afternoon I got confirmation of Oscar’s originality in the form of a phone call from Professor Ramsay Keller, fish expert at the university. He’d identified tetrodotoxin in the vomit on Nora Britton’s knapsack. It was the first time he’d ever heard of the poison being used as a murder weapon. I told him I’d sent four cookies presumably containing more of the same to Professor Dalton Linacre, who would doubtless be passing them on.
On hanging up the phone, I knocked on the door of Detective Inspector Sanderson’s glass-walled office and was waved into his pipe-smoke filled asphyxiation chamber. He had been pestered all day by requests from newspapers and radio stations for details of the Britton murder, and hadn’t been able to add anything to what they’d already read in the Dispatch. He scowled at me under his connecting black eyebrows as if it were all my fault. I reported on my conversations with Gussie and Professor Keller, hoping he’d be so grateful that he’d authorize a call to Aurora.
“What investigative purpose would that serve?”
“I’d like to brief Nora Britton’s family.”
Sanderson gave his lower lip a thoughtful pinch. “Leave it a day. Maybe they’ll call first and spare us the cost.”
And so to my surprise it turned out. I’d just got off the phone to Peter Craig at the Canadian Arena Company in Montreal, a long distance charge Sanderson could not refuse.
Peter Craig was saddened but not shocked that his brother had died a violent death. He had expected, though, it would have resulted from a brawl or possibly the attack of a jealous husband. He had trouble accepting that Oscar had started a gunfight with police — and more trouble yet with the idea that Oscar had poisoned a fellow artist. I heard from the architect none of the spite against Oscar that Gussie had prepared me for. He said it was true the two brothers hadn’t spoken in years, but that the coldness was all on Oscar’s side. Peter had been glad to read in the press that Oscar had made a major sale to the Whistler Gallery in New York. Work tied Peter Craig to Montreal for the foreseeable future, but after the post-mortem on Oscar he would send for his brother’s remains and possessions. He particularly wanted an expert to inventory the art from Oscar’s apartment and classroom studio at Central Technical School. Perhaps at a future moment, when grief for Oscar’s victims was less raw, some sort of public exhibition could be arranged.
I was just wondering how that suggestion would sit with Nora’s family when Effie Britton phoned. She was actually in Toronto, having taken a day off teaching to have a new brace fitted. She wanted to tell me that Herman, without needing to be asked, had offered to send Nora’s ashes to Aurora so that her parents could give them Christian burial.
“I don’t imagine he’ll be attending,” I said.
“No. I wouldn’t mind, but it would be torture for him and everyone else.”
I told her what we now knew about Nora’s death. There was no longer any need to withhold Oscar’s name. It didn’t mean anything to her.
“How awful, though,” she said, with a catch in her throat. “I thought that — although I live in a small town and don’t go to parties with artists — well, I thought I understood Nora’s world a little.” Effie paused. “Nora took a fellow artist as a lover, and he killed her. Can you make sense of that?”
I couldn’t, of course, but I did my best.
“He resented Nora for wanting to break with him and return to Herman, but resented her more for doing it considerately.”
“That’s perverse. In Nora’s world, isn’t taking lovers and changing lovers expected?”
“Oscar Craig wasn’t just an artist, Effie, but a fighter — a belligerent long after most of us had given it up. And a self-appointed execution squad.”
Effie took some time to mull that over.
“Just as well he wasn’t taken alive,” she said at last. “The trial would have rubbed nerves raw, and the strain wouldn’t have ended with a guilty verdict. My parents disagree about the propriety of capital punishment.”
Chapter 20
The person I was waiting to hear from was Ruth, and I had to wait until the detectives on night duty arrived and only Rudy Crate and I were left over from the day.
I asked the Englishman if he really had no home to go home to. He said he was sleeping on the chesterfield of friends of a cousin — at no expense so long as he was out of the flat by seven thirty each morning and didn’t return till ten thirty at night. Not an ideal arrangement long term, he granted.
“He
re’s a thought, Paul,” he said. “With all the notoriety, Craig’s landlord may have trouble finding a new tenant for the murderer’s flat. Do you think he’d let it to me at a discount?”
I was saved from answering by Ruth’s entrance, in a slate grey business suit with a longer skirt than I’d ever seen her wear. The crime reporter had replaced the fashion page contributor. Parsons had gone home to an early supper; she installed herself at his desk and asked me for all the “now it can be told” stuff — information released or acquired since last night. She wrote as fast as I talked.
“Well and good, Paul, thanks,” she said when I’d finished. “But what I really need is dope you didn’t give other journalists. For example, in which ice cream parlour were Oscar and Nora seen canoodling?”
“Polar Treat, opposite Christ Church.”
Ruth made a note. “I don’t know if you heard,” she said, “but I was just talking to the rector, and apparently they’re going to hold a third competition for the mural design. Nothing against Nora, but some parishioners were disturbed by the depiction of modern weapons of war on the church wall. Swords would have been acceptable, but out of tune with the Great War uniforms. Rather than have an understudy step in to make modifications, they’re going back to the beginning. Sir Joseph Deane hasn’t decided yet if he’s willing to involve himself.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw the waters closing over the winner of the second competition as they had over the first. The image made me all the keener to celebrate Ruth’s triumphant rise. She had once asked me to escort her across the Don River to Pork Chops Lariviere’s gambling club. Tonight I did it. We took Oscar’s photo and found witnesses to his dust-up with Jack Wellington. No one else suspected Oscar, and for jurisdictional reasons the fight formed no part of my department’s investigation. This would be Ruth’s exclusive.
People sometimes won money at My Blue Heaven, money they actually carried out the door. Pork Chops must have figured that the spectacle of a winner from time to time gave the suckers hope. One lean-jawed bird, for example, a man of thirty in a shabby suit, was just getting up from the blackjack table with a fistful of bills, distributing ten-dollar tips to waiters and the hat check girl. He looked familiar, but more so once he’d crushed his fedora down over his forehead. I could suddenly see his clean-shaven mug with two-days stubble and his thin mouth with a toothpick hanging out of the corner.